Search engines and Google hacking

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Explore using Google Hacking and Search Engines for Footprinting and Reconnaissance. Lisa Bock traverses through the early days of search engines to today, where web spiders crawl the web and update search indexes. Discover how Google Hacking can help uncover security holes, advisories, and server vulnerabilities.

- [Voiceover] Formalized search engines…began on the Internet as early as 1990…with a primitive tool called Archie.…As you can see here, here's is Archie's query form,…and it's pretty good.…It gives you information on how would you like to search it,…search type, case, and what is your output format.…Many of us use search engines…to locate information such as employee directories,…login pages and portals,…hidden and external internal URLs…which can be high for conducting…social engineering and system attacks.…

Now there are many search engines,…some of them which are Google, Bing, and Yahoo.…But search engines have to get the data…before compiling the indexes.…How they accomplish this is by using web spiders…that crawl through the web pages…gathering and indexing information.…Google's web crawling bots are called Googlebots,…which detect new and updated pages…to be stored in the robust Google indexes.…Google has many advanced capabilities…including translating documents,…performing news and image searches, and more.…

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Author

Updated

1/10/2019

Released

4/28/2016

If you watched our Introduction to Ethical Hacking course, you know the basics of ethical hacking. Ethical hackers use their knowledge for good: to test if an organization's network is vulnerable to outside attacks. But where do they start? With footprinting (aka reconnaissance), the process of gathering information about computers and the people to which they belong. In this course, Lisa Bock introduces the concepts, tools, and techniques behind footprinting: finding related websites, determining OS and location information, identifying users through social media and financial services, tracking email, and more. Footprinting relies on tools as simple as a web search and dumpster diving, and as complex as DNS interrogation and traceroute analysis. Lisa shows how to put these nefarious sounding tools to work for good, and mitigate any risks an organization has to these types of attacks.

Note: Our Ethical Hacking series maps to the 18 parts of the EC-Council's certification exam. This course maps to the 02 Footprinting and Reconnaissance domain.